Christmas in Khobar - Excerpt from Salt Tablet Lake

Half Moon Bay! What can I say? 

Living in 1950s Aramco, it was paradise. Not as much for the Ras Tanurans who lived at the beach, but for those us in Dhahran living on the rocky jabal or the citizens of Abqaiq, planted deep within a vast sand dune field thirty miles from the coast, Half Moon Bay spelled happiness.

From the beginning its warm, unspoiled waters lured us all: toddlers, mud castle builders, swimmers, fishermen, sailors, water skiers, snorkelers and beachgoers of every age. 

The shore was completely undeveloped and the beaches as far as you could see were absolutely as pristine as they always had been – not a speck of plastic litter anywhere. Just clean sand bleeding off into the waist-high water for a few yards until sharply descending 15 or 20 feet at the drop off. 

In the summer the water temperature can get into the high 80s but go out to the drop-off and dive under about six feet and you’ll hit the thermocline, a sharply defined layer of cooler water, and the temperature will drop to the 70s. Cool and refreshing. The entire coastline of Half Moon Bay was pretty much the way it had always been for thousands of years, if not more. 

A road had been built across the head of the bay, maybe in the 1940s, leaving to the north a lake a couple of hundred yards long that was cut off from the bay. Salt water kept seeping in, but it never left and the lake kept getting saltier and saltier. The water was much greener than in the bay, so we called it Salt Tablet Lake in honor of the hallowed salt tablet and the ubiquitous hunter green salt tablet dispensers that were everywhere in Aramco. Every weekend hundreds of adults drove past the Salt Tablet on the way to the Yacht Club. Hardly any of them bothered to check it out, but we did. 

The Salt Tablet was probably saltier than the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. We’d wade out into four feet of water and sit down to float around as if we were seated in chaise lounges. Go out a little deeper and try to dive to the bottom and you couldn’t do it. No matter how hard you swam, by the time you got past your knees you‘d come bobbing back up like a cork.

We’re all sixteen. Ben, Landis and I are floating around in the Salt Tablet with Marie and Sheila. Splashing each other, trying to dive down, bobbing around talking about the party tonight at Barclay’s. It’s August around two in the afternoon. The temperature is about 125 degrees and the UV Hazard Index is about 20 points over death ray, so we are obviously having a great time....

Christmas in Khobar @ Amazon

Close Call

Excerpt from Another Close Call at Jebel Shamaal

The fellows have finished exploring the base of the jebel and are making their way back up to their camp on the peak...

Eventually the sun begins to set, and we drift back to the jebel. Billy K. is still a little antsy. By now he is shooting at large boulders that are impossible to miss. Ben and I take the lead and are about forty yards up the slope when K-Man shoots Ben in the back. 

It’s not really a big deal. The range was long, and it didn’t more than sting him, but it ignites a pellet-gun war.

Ski Half Moon!

Excerpt:

My dad loved water skiing. He was really good at it and, though he was in his mid-forties and wouldn’t have risked the ski jump in its heyday, he became quite agile on one slalom ski. Slashing back and forth across the wake as my godfather Steve Furman laconically sped us across the bay. Eight years old and the size of a tall, rhesus monkey, I was the spotter. 
     A bright-eyed, lanky 14-year-old, my sister Annie was a natural athlete and terrific horsewoman with plenty of Gymkhana blue ribbons to her name. She was eager to water ski and mastered it almost immediately. 
     To a passing Bedouin the sight of our speeding boat trailing a very long rope held by a ninety pound girl who waves as she passes, would make no sense at all and definitely provide much food for thought.
     But Annie is having a great time. Tom is chilling at the wheel. The motor is purring, the Grumman is slicing through the water and Half Moon Bay salt spray mists the air. All is good. And then it isn’t.
     I had just turned to look to the bow and we both saw it at the same time. There was really nothing we could do. It was less than a fifty yards ahead of us and there was nowhere to turn. Tom couldn’t stop or even veer off because Annie might lose her grip. And fall into a giant swirling pod of jellyfish.
He has to steer straight through it and Annie just has to hold on or else.
     Near the end of summer, the jellyfish bloom. A very pale, almost translucent blue they are about the size of half a soccer ball with a feathery fringe and a bunch of stubby tentacles covered with hundreds of spring loaded stingers that fire on contact.  
     They aren’t too bad to swim around because they are usually just one or two, here or there. However under certain tidal and current conditions they would be swept together into a swirling pod. A hundred and fifty foot circle packed tight with thousands of jellyfish caught in a strange and deadly Sargasso Sea.
     I spin to watch Annie. She hasn’t seen the jellies yet, but then the water turns pale with their multitude. She realizes what’s happening. My heart is in my throat. My sister will certainly die if she falls...

Christmas in Khobar is available at Amazon.

Christmas in Khobar

Another collection of wonderful stories about early Dhahran from a veteran of it all.

To follow up the success of his first book of short stories Arabian Son, Tim Barger, the imp of Satan as his mother used to call him, has returned with more stories set in the almost mythical days of Dhahran in the fifties. A small, bare bones oil company town surrounded by miles of desert in every direction, it was home to about two thousand American employeess, maybe six hundred families and several hundred children.

     These tales are about the barely supervised exploits of Tim and his friends as well as some of the colorful characters of the era: the pioneering Abqaiq housewife Martha, the driller Clark Randall, the stoic Gil Strader, and the legendary John Ames.

     His stories take you to places that few have even imagined. He offers a glimpse of the often unseen: the pure, but orchestrated chaos of the used car suq in Riyadh, the solemn quiet at the bottom of a 50 feet deep artesian well in Qatif, the rocky slopes of Jebel Shamaal or the splendor of Half Moon Bay at night with a crackling camp fire and a full moon rising.

    Careless can mean care free, “without a care in the world,” but it is mostly used to describe reckless decision making i.e. stupidity. Barger was both care free and prone to ill-conceived adventures in which the only possible upside was that he would survive to tell the tale.  And he has. 

Arabian Son: 21 Stories

Tim Barger’s collection of stories about his years growing up in Aramco are a study in impaired judgment and poor impulse control - yet they are entirely recognizable to any of us who lived in a place where you woke up to the muezzin and went to  lunch at the whistle.

Living in a house very much like this one on 11th Street in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Tim Barger grew up in the 1950s thinking that blinding heat, humidity and howling dust-storms were normal. By seven he had already experienced several locust plagues and was looking forward to the next one.

Arabian Son is a collection of stories about Barger and his friends’ misguided attempts to amuse themselves in an oil camp lean on amenities and devoid of movies and TV. Crawling through hedges frosted with DDT, climbing hundred-foot radio towers, spelunking through a subterranean maze of air conditioning vents, ten-year-olds, they made the most of the world they had.

  Neither they nor their parents had the vaguest idea that Aramco would soon become the anchor of the global petroleum economy. The boys riding their bikes off of rooftops into dense hedges only knew that they were laughing themselves silly. They could not have realized just how soon their Dhahran would recede into the rear-view mirror to vanish into progress.

A Few Excerpts

My second day hanging around the job site, a plasterer took me aside and using some plaster on a shingle swiftly shaped a fish and then deftly transformed it into a bird as if he were some primitive Saudi Picasso.

     Hooky

We were all stunned into silence – for about ten seconds – then we erupted in convulsions of laughter.

     Scott Miller’s Invention

We made our way up the AC ducting to the grill work and could see everybody on the other side raptly watching the movie. All the front row seats were occupied by kids we knew, the reflected light from the screen flickering across them in different colors and shades, the soundtrack blaring. They didn't know that we were there - just 10 feet away.

     Rites of Passage

Then the feature would burst on to that beautiful, big screen and all of us, adults and kids, would step into a world so far away from Dhahran that you couldn’t measure it.

     Dhahran’s Palace of Dreams

The frontal lobe comes up with marvelous ideas like wouldn’t it be fun to ride a skateboard down a steep hill that crosses a busy intersection? Or my favorite that actually happened – wouldn’t it be a kick to grab one of those deadly poisonous sea snakes at Half Moon Bay and handle it until it bit you?

     Think Ahead

Well, the money was for emergencies and being absolutely ignorant we had no idea what “two-drink minimum” meant but behind that beaded curtain was Lana, so we pulled out the cash and were ushered in.

     Looking for Lana

After a few minutes, backlit by the rising sun, a Russian wolfhound comes running down the surf line followed by a tall, beautiful young girl with blonde hair to her waist wearing a yellow bikini. She is gracefully skipping along like a gazelle on helium.

     Walking to Ras Tanura

Somewhat concerned, we approach Milt’s lifeless form sprawled out under the streetlight.

     Kangaroo Bikes

Half a dozen kids were bunched together like a stalk of asparagus with their arms up in the air undulating like a gigantic sea anemone. Strange James was in an air guitar paroxysm and everyone else was just flailing it up.

     The Double-Shot Solution

Find a couple of fluorescent tubes and we would instantly have a dramatic and very brief sword fight that ended in a burst of shattered glass and a faint cloud of super-carcinogenic mist.

     The Rule of Life

ARABIAN SON: 21 Stories

By Tim Barger

E-book: $4.95

Paperback: 142 pages ~ $12.95

ISBN: 978-098820505-5

The Double-Shot Solution

THE DOUBLE -SHOT SOLUTION

     With Lou Reed’s passing and so many people discussing his impact on the contemporary culture of the 60s I can’t help but to remember the first time I ever heard the Velvet Underground. It was in Dhahran when I was 19. This very wonderful but basically quiet girl, I’ll call Sharon, who I had known my whole life finally had convinced her parents to allow a small party for only her college-age friends – as if that was more respectable than the usual horde of returning students. 

     The day before the party she asked me if I would be the bar tender. This was obviously the worst decision possible but I was touched that she thought I was worthy of such a responsibility and of course I was at her service. So the next night I arrived early in a clean shirt, perfectly happy to be a proper bar tender, and she showed me her parents’ bar set-up and put out the ingredients, the shot glass and the glasses.

      Well this wasn’t my first cocktail party but my problem with the previous ones was that after waiting in line, you’d get your one shot and it wasn’t long before you’d have to wait in line again. My insight was that I’d give each drinker a double shot and then I wouldn’t have to see him or her for twice as long. It was a great idea. There were about 30 college-age kids and things were boiling along when some guy came rushing through the front door with the Velvet Underground album, the one with the banana on the cover. “This is so cool.” he says. And it was.

     The Stones LP comes off the record player and the Velvet vinyl starts playing for about the first time in Arabia. The party was already cooking but when the cacophonous Velvets started up, dead pan Nico singing and then Lou Reed began his hypnotic droning that somehow became so urgent, everybody started dancing wilder and chanting lyrics that they had never heard before. By the time that Waiting for the Man started playing the whole room was a writhing bacchanalia of frenzied dancers that quickly crashed when the record finished.

     A new album went on the record player but people seemed listless, worn out, they started to leave and barely three hours later, inexplicably, this party was just about over. An old friend of mine who I’d known since second grade, came up for a drink. I poured her the usual double-shots I’d been serving all night long, when she said, “Do you know that is a double-shot glass?”

     Yikes! I had been pouring quadruple shots. Can’t say if that had something to do with the enthusiasm for the Velvet Underground but it was directly responsible for the short half-life of the party. I closed the bar and fled. The next day Sharon called to thank me for my help. She couldn’t stop talking about the Velvets. To her the party was a fabulous success and thanks to Lou Reed I guess it was.

Hiatus

I've been pretty much a human billiard ball bouncing around doing a variety of projects and have neglected Arabian Son. I've been on hiatus as they say in Hollywood. But for 14 I'm going to spend more time with those memories that started at Half Moon Bay and ended in humid nights dancing like there was no tomorrow - Mafi Bukra.

Here's the links to some of my newer stories at AramcoExpats.com - they are way more competent than I am at presenting these stories properly.

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